I also sort of felt it was descriptive at the time, just of the amount of fronting I have to do just to pick up a microphone and pretend like everyone ought to pay a lot of attention to me. Seems like a lot of fronting.

Actually I picked the name because someone had taken a snapshot of me rapping on stage with a funk band that a friend of mine was in. I had just sort of stepped up with them for a second. And I was just looking at this picture of myself, like, you know, grinning and holding this mic up to my mouth like all the real rappers, and I was gripped with self-hatred, and I wrote, "MC Frontalot's Raptacular Funfest" on there with like a Sharpie, just kind of stabbing at myself. But I don't know, then I thought it was intriguing and/or funny, and I kept it.

SFBG: Do you worry about being taken seriously as an artist? Obviously there's an aspect of humor to it, but you are a serious musician, so how do you reconcile that?

DH: I guess I don't usually worry about it. I know that everyone who's sort of within the core audience will be attracted to the humor in it, and there's plenty of humor in it. And I love almost everything that I'm into to have some humor in it. Even all of the politics I consume is funny.

You know, I like to read Wonkette and 23/6 and stuff like that. I like my horror movies to be funny. I like everything to be funny. I don't like anything to be disposably funny, and I'm not interested in parody at all. So I do worry, of course, that someone here's like, "Oh, nerds rapping, that's just going to be some kind of a gag, or a one-note joke."

But I don't worry that the people who are gonna have the potential to be my fans are gonna think that, 'cause they'll take one listen and they'll hear what's going on lyrically, and they'll hear that we're serious about the music, and I hope that they'll find there's something worth listening to over and over in there. The way MC Lars put it in the documentary is, the goal is to be funny without being a joke. And that's a thin line potentially, but I'm pretty happy with how most of the stuff comes out.

SFBG: In the film, there's an issue raised of nerdcore being construed as racist. How would you respond to those allegations?

DH: Well, there's a lot of kids doing nerdcore, and I guess you'd need to look at everything case by case. I know there are some kids who are calling themselves nerdcore and don't take rap very seriously, who think that by sort of rapping badly that that's funny and that they're somehow exposing some weakness of hip-hop itself. Of course, those people are idiots. I have no interest in approaching music that way. That would be a big waste of time.

Are those kids racist? I'm not sure. I've certainly heard a lot of, like, indie rock consumers dismiss rap out of hand, and there's always seemed to me to be some seed of racism in that dismissal. But the kids who are making the nerdcore that I like and these kids that I tour with, I think it all comes from a deep and an aware respect of the fact that hip-hop is a piece of black culture that we're happening to try to create something that's associated with it. But like I said, unless you delve into parody, there's no aspect of it that's critical of rap itself. I certainly am never trying to expose anything absurd about rap culture.

SFBG: Another question Nerdcore Rising touches on is whether or not nerdcore can ever become popular to the masses. Can it go mainstream, and will it?

DH: It's not inconceivable. Anyone could make a song from anything that seems to be a niche genre and have a good enough hook to it that everyone's ears perk up when it comes on, and it becomes popular. But just on the basis of it being nerdcore, could the idea of nerdcore become mainstream? That seems unlikely based on what it is.

It's something that's speaking to an identity that's by definition non-dominant, non-mainstream, separated from all the things that make the top strata of pop culture popular, you know, like glossiness, shininess, glamour, beauty, popularity.

SFBG: Returning to the film, what was left out of it - whether about the music or about you personally - that you want people to know about?

DH: What was left out of the film? God, I don't know. What was left out of the film? Hey, Brandon, what was left out of the documentary that the public should have known? What did Negin [Farsad, the director] like hide from the public about nerdcore and what it all means? Exactly the sort of question I don't know how to answer.

I remember the first time I saw the movie I realized, like, the whole thing is sort of from a perspective outside of, like, nerd-ness, you know, outside of nerd culture. It's sort of like an introduction, like, here's what nerds are like. It's almost like you're in a zoo or something. That was sort of her approach, to make this sort of general interest movie, but I guess it ends up leaving out all of the real sort of dorky stuff that we tend to talk about. You know, we'll sit and talk about game mechanics for an hour or something, but that's the kind of thing that would have massive interest to our fans if they were watching the movie but of course, like, no interest to a general movie audience.

SFBG: Have you seen your fanbase increasing with the movie kind of spreading around?

DH: I've been noticing a ton of e-mail from people in Europe, I think because they're all pirating it off Danish torrent servers.

SFBG: The rest of my questions are more about nerd culture in general. First, are there any nerdy things that you just don't get or otherwise aren't into?

DH: Oh, yeah, there's a bunch. Like, I'm not into Harry Potter. I'm not into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm not really very into Star Trek, although many people are on one side or the other of a Star Trek/Star Wars divide.

SFBG: So you fall more on the Star Wars side, then?

DH: Oh, yeah.

SFBG: Do you have a favorite Star Wars?

DH: Well, Empire, of course.

SFBG: And how many hours a day would you say you spend on the computer?

DH: Um, usually, it's like seven to 18. I mean, I just get up and I'm on the computer a lot. I have to walk the dog. I come back, I'm on the computer a lot. I mean, you go on tour and you're not in front of the computer at all for six weeks at a time. Or you go out and actually do something with your day, but most days, it's computer all day.

SFBG: And to close it off back on the music, what's next for you and for nerdcore? Where do you see yourself and the genre moving?

DH: Well, there's this current sort of pop culture fascination with nerds and nerderie. You know, there's like IT Crowd and whatever that other sitcom is. And there's all these comic book movies becoming hits. God, what were we looking through? Like, Maxim, or something. You know, there's this almost entirely naked fashion model sprawled out in a big spread, and the big pull quote is like, "I consider myself a nerd, really."

So there's this little moment of trendiness of it right now. I don't know if that's driven by the techno surge performing culture very slightly, or if it's just one of the many random ebbs and flows of American culture. But it sort of seems like the moment when nerderie could, you know, catch the eye of the kind of people who push culture into the mainstream. You know, the big record companies or whatever could conceivably seize this moment to make nerdcore be much more noticeable than it's been.

But I don't know if that would really, in the long-run, serve us and do us any good. The grassroots approach of actually reaching dedicated fans ourselves through the Internet has been serving us really well. And its trajectory is such that it seems like the handful of us who are viable touring bands and who are very serious about the music side of it - it seems as though we are on trajectory, even without any kind of cultural wave, to continue to have successful careers with it, no matter what the fickle tastes of the general public might otherwise dictate.

So I don't know really whether it would be good or bad to get the traditional success model applied to us. Surely, it would be lucrative in the short-term, but I don't know whether that would be our best bet. You do hear of many bands who hit a moment of their particular style's emergence, and then four years later, feel very ripped off by the hundred grand they still owe their label, or scoffs that they receive from talking heads on I Love the '90s.

(Some time later…)

DH: Yeah, I didn't mean to blow off the racism question. I really contemplate that a lot. It's difficult to, like, hop into the two genres of music that ever emerged out of America, both of which were created by black Americans, and create a small amount of success as someone's who's not black. I don't know quite how I feel about that.

I come from Berkeley, so I have a predisposition for sitting around worrying about the racial politics of everything that I do. I don't know. I don't quite know how to resolve it, so I just kind of hope that the respect I feel for the origins of the things that I'm appropriating is clear enough that no one ever feels offended by the music.

SFBG: I think the music does speak for itself, but I just wanted to get your take on it, because I felt like it was something that was brushed on in the movie, but I wanted to hear your side of it more.

DH: I'm glad it was touched on a little in the movie. I think it would've been interesting if that came out more. Actually there's something I thought there was not enough of in the movie, were people reacting critically to the band.

There was only that one segment of like, sort of meatheads and snobs brushing us off. Like, I think there's probably a lot of very non-meathead, non-snobby hip-hop fans who would have a bad reaction to me. And you didn't see that much of that in the movie. I kind of even think that would have made the narrative of the movie stronger, because there's so much about this idea of the nerds as an identity group being underdogs, but there's not that many people, like, kicking us around in the movie.

And, you know, in adult nerd life there's not all that much of that anyway, if you're not like sitting around in a bar trying to talk to the pretty girl that the guy who was a jock in high school also has his eye on. You don't tend to have those interactions after you leave the world of school. But there definitely was plenty of that in all of our lives when we were younger.

MC FRONTALOT
With MC Lars and DJ Omar
Wed/19, 9 p.m., $15
Uptown Night Club
1928 Telegraph, Oakl.
(510) 451-8100